Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes has "got to find some more time from somewhere" or be braced for "a tough weekend" following Friday practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix.

Mercedes was struggling with tyre wear and unable to match the pace of Red Bull as Hamilton ended FP2 with the 10th quickest time, some 0.8s off the pace. He said after the session that Mercedes was losing time but unsure where and would need to work hard overnight to try and find out how to get more from the car.

"Definitely it looks like it's going to be a tough weekend for us," Hamilton said. "We're working as hard as we can and we've just got to find some more time from somewhere. I don't really know where we're losing it, but still, at least we got through the day and there are still positives we can take out of it. So we're just going to try and analyse everything and try and see if we can find some more time somewhere."

With the high temperatures making tyre preservation difficult, Hamilton said the conditions were proving a real challenge for Mercedes.

"It sucks because you just sweat your arse off, and the other one is that it's so hard to look after the tyres. The degradation just gets very tricky and then I don't know how some people are able to do it better than others but definitely we're struggling compared to some others.

"Strategy-wise I've not spoken to the team about that, I don't even know what kind of strategy we'll be on this weekend; whether it's a three or a four stop, who knows? I anticipate it will be something similar to the last race but at the last race we had a lot of understeer and here we have rear degradation so we've done as many laps as we can to try and prove out the long run; maybe tomorrow we'll do some more."